Let Us Celebrate the Anniversary of Vanessa Place’s Escape From the Womb
Poet Kenneth Goldsmith has said Place’s work was “arguably the most challenging, complex and controversial literature being written today,” and poet Rae Armantrout has remarked, “Vanessa Place is writing terminal poetry.” Bebrowed’s Blog said Place is “the scariest poet on the planet.” Anonymous on Twitter said, “Vanessa Place killed poetry.”
Wife Beaters & Cut-Offs: Southern Summer Comfort Book Tour
Chloe Caldwell, Elizabeth Ellen, Mary Miller, Brandi Wells and Donora Hillard are getting in a rental van and sailing the South.
I’m really excited about this. The Southern part of the US needs as much love as we can get. It’s hot down here, and we’ve got mosquitos and no gay marriage.
If you live in one of these cities (Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Oxford, Tuscaloosa or Atlanta), or if you are feeling generous, you can donate money on the tour’s Kickstarter page here.
If you catch me in Houston, I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk for a long time about racism/sexism/Tao Lin.
Here are the tour dates:
July 11th – Austin, TX – Domy Books, 7pm
July 12th – Houston, TX – Domy Books, 7pm
July 13th – New Orleans, LA
July 14th – Oxford, MS – Square Books, 6pm
July 16th – Tuscaloosa, AL
July 17th – Atlanta, GA – Beep Beep, 8pm
a few rad things
THIS Friday, celebrate the release of Her Royal Majesty: Issue 12 with parties/readings in 6 international cities: Paris, London, Berlin, New York, Toronto, & Montreal… party info here, magazine ordering info here.
THIS Mary Ruefle erasure can be read online in its entirety and it is incredible.
THIS poem by Wallace Stevens is rad, confusing:
Lions in Sweden
No more phrases, Swenson: I was once
A hunter of those sovereigns of the soul
And savings banks, Fides, the sculptor’s prize,
All eyes and size, and galled Justitia,
Trained to poise the tables of the law,
Patientia forever soothing wounds
And mighty Fortitudo, frantic bass.
But these shall not adorn my souvenirs,
These lions, these majestic images.
If the fault is with the soul, the sovereigns
Of the soul must likewise be at fault, and first.
If the fault is with the souvenirs, yet these
Are the soul itself. And the whole of the soul, Swenson,
As every man in Sweden will concede,
Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,
Still hankers after sovereign images.
If the fault is with the lions, send them back
To Monsieur Dufy’s Hamburg whence they came.
The vegetation still abounds with forms.
Thank you. I hope everyone is good.
Sticky Fingers
In 1984, a year masquerading as a didactic yet prophetic novel, the real person of my father was kicked out of his home by the real person of my mother; I make such differentiation because real life, containing such real people, has no front and back cover, only addendums and epilogues under constant revision, not to mention a disorganized index of horror. My father, whose emotional abuse was verging on physical, recently kicked out after a bad night involving a six-pack of import beer and a kitchen knife, just past 40, rented a room four blocks away in a house he proudly referred to as of “bachelors,” showing me the cool Mazda RX-7 parked in the driveway, whose owner greeted this narrator with a swift “hey” in the manner of a dude out to party who wanted nothing to do with his new 41-year-old roommate and his 8-year-old son engaged in their ongoing “Sunday visits,” whose unnatural allocation was incurred by the former’s domestic transgression.
RIP Maurice Sendak
Watching, owning, looking at, listening to, thinking about, and at last finally reading Solaris
I adore Stanisław Lem. And for ages I’ve wanted to read his masterpiece Solaris (1961), but haven’t, even though I own a couple of beat-up mass paperback copies, because the only English translation available has been the Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox 1970 adaptation, which they “translated from the French”—from Jean-Michel Jasiensko’s 1966 translation—and which Lem himself purportedly disliked, and which my Polish friends have repeatedly told me is terrible, and which I’ve nonetheless tried to read on a number of occasions, but was never able to get more than a few pages into before I’d give up and instead rewatch Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 cinematic adaptation (which Lem also openly disliked; the man wasn’t afraid to voice his opinions). (And even with that film, it wasn’t until I saw Criterion’s 2002 DVD release that I realized how magnificent it was; the 1997 VHS release was washed out and split across two tapes, and I think even pan-and-scanned, rendering it pretty underwhelming.)
Today I noticed that there’s a new and direct translation of Solaris available, albeit only electronically (and as an audio book). It’s by Bill Johnston, “a professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University.” (The audio book version is read by Alessandro Juliani, who I see played Lt. Felix Gaeta on Battlestar Galactica.) … So has anyone out there read it, or listened to it? (This new Solaris, not BG.) From what I can see online, it certainly looks more promising. Here’s Kilmartin/Cox:
At 19.00 hours, ship’s time, I made my way to the launching bay. The men around the shaft stood aside to let me pass, and I climbed down into the capsule. Inside the narrow cockpit, there was scarcely room to move. I attached the hose to the valve on my space suit and inflated it rapidly. From then on, I was incapable of making the smallest movement. There I stood, or rather hung suspended, enveloped in my pneumatic suit and yoke to the metal hull.
And here, by way of contrast, is the start of Johnston’s new edition:
At nineteen hundred hours ship’s time I climbed down the metal ladder past the bays on either side into the capsule. Inside, there was just enough room to raise my elbows. After I attached the end of the cables into the port jutting from the side of the capsule, my space suit filled with air and from that point on I couldn’t make the slightest movement. I stood, or rather hung suspended, in a bed of air, all of one piece with my metal shell.
Finally, while on the subject of Solaris, has anyone out there seen that other movie version that got made? You know—the one by Lidiya Ishimbayeva and Boris Nirenburg?
Thinking about all these different editions of Solaris got me wondering what the original Polish movie poster for Solaris looked like. If you’ve become curious as well, then wonder no longer:
Progress vs. Catastrophe: Underworld by and beyond Benjamin’s Angel of History
A Brief Introduction to the Themes
In 1940, Walter Benjamin published an essay, consisting of a collection of brief reflections, titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The ninth thesis describes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, in which an angel “look[s] as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating” (Benjamin 257). Benjamin links this to “the angel of history” observing the world through the position of the past. While the future pushes on inevitably—insists he take notice—the angel is turned away, caught up in the disasters of the past. This overseer wants to arrest the present, stop progress altogether in order to amend the disasters and failures of history, and finds itself in a struggle against the powerful reality of the ever-advancing state of existence. Thus, a rivalry between progress and catastrophe is established.
Don DeLillo’s 1997 magnum opus Underworld meditates heavily on Benjamin’s ninth thesis. The progress of society, through the lens of the Cold War begins in 1951 and is presented in reverse chronological order, backwards from 1992, after the complete dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. The undulating anxiety regarding Western society’s seemingly imminent doom is displaced by an anxiety within the context of the American Dream. Baseball, bureaucracy, sex, waste, art, religion, and crime take on the weight of the present’s baggage through the obsessive compulsions of the past.
There is no direct solution to the conflict of Benjamin’s thesis, just as DeLillo offers little individual resolution for his characters. However, the driving force of salvation, the one in which we thrust our faith and loyalty, is the same in both dilemmas: the angel. The angel of history is trapped in a moral and physical bind; it seeks some way in which to move on from humanity’s historical failings—the “single catastrophe”—and to avoid, or amend, the forthcoming quandaries of the world—the “storm” (257-8). DeLillo’s angel, Esmeralda, extends this notion further, and acts as a Christ-like sacrifice for history and an entity from which to begin anew, look around, and turn toward progress.
A Few Books I’ve Enjoyed Recently
Aliss at the Fire
by Jon Fosse
Dalkey Archive, 2010
This was a really haunting read. The book takes the form of an extended interior monologue written in a terse, stripped-down prose that enacts an intense and haunting landscape of loss and memory. The ghosts, both of the dead and live, intermingle in a strange drama. I felt like I was overcome by a subtly increasing anxiety as I read this in one sitting.
How I Became A Nun
by César Aira
New Directions, 2007
This was recommended to me by my friend Felipe, the back cover toting the impressive blurb from Roberto Bolaño: “[Aira] is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today.” Indeed, the strange hyper-reality of the six-year old boy/girl narrator that revolves around an incident involving strawberry ice cream is a strange trip. The narrative convulses with the narrator’s delirious perspective on the world, a precise dark humor, and the sense of listening to an oddly but hyper-calculated musical composition.
The Great Fire of London
by Jacques Roubaud
Dalkey Archive, 2006
Self-labeled as a “bi-furcated novel,” this is one I might dare call a “masterpiece.” It is a difficult read, and also difficult to really explain, but the narrative is compulsive in its expansion, the density and beauty of the interstitual prose offering a sense of continuous simultaneity. Probably the easiest way to summarize the project is to say that this is a novel about the failure to write a novel, the ruins and grief turned into novel, questioning too the very nature of a “project.” The Loop and Mathematics are already in my queue.
Conspiracy Cinema
by David Ray Carter
Headpress, 2012
With the statement, “Conspiracy theories are a type of rebellion,” I was really intrigued to delve into the book. Reading the introduction got me excited and sort of wanting to play a game of Illuminati. The body of the text itself, though, is more appropriate as a primer or reference book, offering a vast list of films and works falling under the banner of “conspiracy cinema” with brief descriptions and thoughts. What I wanted honestly was a deeper analysis and reflections on these works’ significance in a broader context, though perhaps this volume helps to set the stage for more studies in this area.
Nick Demske
by Nick Demske
Fence Books, 2010
I was just thinking the whole time, how did I not read this earlier? The back of the book: “He desensitizes your obscenity-mometer” which I misread as “obscenity-monster.” An excerpt from one of my favorite sonnets in the collection “As Far Away”: The Holocaust never existed. What are you going to do / About it? The Holocaust never happened, but your mother’s autopsy reveals / It can if you just believe.” Most of my thoughts on this book are fragments, shards, but yes: intense, obscene, honest, repulsive, contemplative, hallucinatory, & really smart.
3 Comments
May 8th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
May 8th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Lily Hoang—
Dana Levin is a poet. She’s super cool. She’s so cool that someone wrote a song about her. (Seriously, click the link, listen to the song.) How often do poets have songs written for them? Well, if you’re Dana Levin…
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Only the Hulk could have attempted it! Only the Hulk would have been capable of it! Only the Hulk could have done it!!
Pretty much my favorite two pages in comics, ever: